The Eternity Key (2 page)

I grip my coffee cup with both hands, sending a small pulse of electric heat from my palms into it, hoping to warm it up enough to make it palatable again. An abrupt knock sounds against the passenger-side window. I jump in my seat, and a surge of electricity escapes my hands, nearly incinerating the cardboard cup before I drop it in my lap. I hold my hand out, blue light crackling between my fingers, toward the car door as it swings open.

A tiny gray cat jumps through the dark opening, landing on the passenger seat. She yowls at me.

“Hello to you, too, Brim,” I say, knowing I’ve been caught.

I extinguish the lightning in my hand and pick up the cup from my coffee-stained lap, wishing I hadn’t warmed the contents quite so much. Brim jumps over the center console onto my shoulder as Dax follows her into the car. He settles himself into the
passenger seat and pulls the door shut. His hair is damp, and rain has soaked the shoulders of his jacket.

“Liar,” he says, not looking at me as he digs into a paper sack that he’s brought with him.

“You used Brim to track me?” I ask, not realizing that is still a sore spot until I say it. Brim and I share a special bond, and because of it, she can find me anywhere. Simon exploited that fact to follow Daphne and me to the Oracle in Las Vegas, and that unfortunate choice had resulted in both Simon’s and the Oracle’s deaths. Brim might look like a harmless puff of fur, but Simon had made the mistake of ignoring one of the most steadfast rules of the Underrealm: never get a hellcat angry.

I scratch Brim under her chin to let her know there are no hard feelings about her being used to find me once again. Brim purrs next to my ear.

“I used my common sense to find you,” Dax says. “Brim came along for the ride. We brought you something.” He fishes in the paper sack.

“If that’s another taco, Hades help me …” Since Simon is gone, Dax has taken over most of our meals, which means I’ve had more Mexican takeout in the last two weeks than I’d ever care to have in a lifetime.

“It’s chamomile tea,” he says, handing me a capped cup, and pulls out a second for himself. It smells sweeter than the coffee I’ve been nursing all evening, like flowers and honey. I’m about to take a tentative sip when he says, “It’ll help you sleep.”

I put the tea in a cup holder. “I don’t need help sleeping.”

“Those dark circles under your eyes tell a different story.”

“What I mean is that I’m not going to sleep. Not when it’s raining.”

“You need sleep.
Go home
.”

Brim meows as if agreeing with Dax.
Furry little traitor
.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me:
it’s raining. I can’t leave
.”

“Yeah, Haden, I can see that,” he says, gesturing out the windshield. “And it’s just rain. There’s no lightning. No thunder. Rain doesn’t always mean Skylords are about to swoop down on us. Relax. We’re safe.”

“You can’t know that.”

“It’s been two weeks.”

I don’t like being reminded how much time has passed since we returned to Olympus Hills. I don’t know why I really expected anything different, but part of me had thought we would have found the Key by now. Despite all our searching, we haven’t made any progress. It’s like I can feel every second that ticks by without the Key.

It’s not just the rain that keeps me up at night. It’s the nightmares. The visions of Keres ripping through the realms, devouring everything—and everyone …

I know if I tell Dax about my dreams, he will say that they were just that,
dreams
, but part of me worries they’re a premonition of what is to come if we don’t find the Key. Just like the rain feels like an omen now.

As if something else were coming …

“If the Skylords were coming for us, they would have come by now,” Dax says, and I know my thoughts are painted on my face. All my life, I’ve practiced hiding myself behind an expressionless mask—a necessary skill for someone from a place where emotion and affection are considered weaknesses—but I seem to have lost my knack for it of late. Ever since I let Daphne see the real me …

“Deal with it, fearless leader; we got away,” Dax says, and lifts his tea as if proposing a toast in my honor.

A sick feeling washes over me, and I know it’s not from my steady diet of fast-food tacos and coffee. I hit the lever for the windshield wipers, wiping away a thick coat of rainwater. In the distance, I watch one of the lights go out in Daphne’s house. It isn’t her window that goes dark, but I wonder if she was the one who turned out the light.
Can she see me out here now?

Her bedroom is in the back of Joe’s mansion. I’d contemplated climbing the fence and camping out under her window, but I’d barely gotten past the point in which Daphne was referring to me as a creep and a stalker, so I didn’t want to push my luck. Instead, I sit in my car like a sentinel. Making sure there’s no sign of trouble.

Making sure she’s safe.

“You should tell her.” Dax’s voice is so quiet when he says it, I almost wonder if he said anything at all. “No, wait, scratch that,” he says, bolder now. “You
need
to tell her.”

I raise an eyebrow with a noncommittal “Huh?”

“That you’re in love with her, you idiot.”

Panic rises up my throat, burning like vomit. Admitting to myself that I am in love with Daphne had been hard enough—and it had taken the imminent threat of my death to get me to do it.

“I can’t,” I say.

Affection is weakness
, I hear my father’s voice echoing in my head. My jaw aches as I remember his ringed hand slamming into my face when I was a small child. I’d been punished, disowned, stripped of my honor because I’d shown affection for my mother when she died. My love for her had caused me to take a stand against my father, and I’d lost just about everything because of it.

Dax shifts in his seat. “Despite what your father and Master
Crue and all the other Heirs may have taught you, loving someone isn’t a sin. It isn’t a crime, either.”

Love gave you strength
. That’s what Daphne had told me when I related the story of my mother’s death to her. Deep down, I’d known she was right. And I know that my love for Daphne was what gave me the strength to stand up to Ren once more—to try to weave my own destiny. But the idea of
telling her
terrifies me more than the threat of the Skylords and the wrath of the Court combined—because I turned my back on the Underrealm, my father, my chance to be his heir, gave up being a prince, and possibly endangered all the realms, because of my love for Daphne.

That love is all I have left.

It’s the only thing that gives me hope.

And if I confess to her and learn that she does not reciprocate my feelings—then I will have truly lost
everything
.

My fingers shake as I reach for what remains of my coffee cup instead of the chamomile tea. “I can’t,” I say again. Even if I
wanted
to tell Daphne, I wouldn’t be able to find the words.

Against my will, my thoughts flit to Rowan—my twin brother, the one my father and the Court would have chosen as the Champion to collect Daphne if the Oracle of Elysium had not intervened.
Rowan
was the one who had a gift for words. He was the smart one. The cunning one.

A small smile plays on my lips because I like to think that even Rowan, with all his manipulative skills, wouldn’t have been able to trick Daphne into falling in love with him enough to return with him to the Underrealm. She’d have seen right through his lies. As far as I know, my brother is incapable of loving anyone other than himself. All he cares about are power and pride.

Then again, only four months ago, before I was sent to the
mortal world, before I met Daphne, before I refused to hand her over to my father, all anyone would have said I cared about was getting my honor back.

But I proved I wouldn’t sacrifice her to do it. Rowan would have handed Daphne over without blinking, if he were in my place. He would have done anything necessary to succeed where I had failed.

Dax clears his throat, pulling my thoughts away from Rowan.

“So are you hoping that, by sitting outside her house every night, she’ll figure it out on her own?”

“I don’t sit out here every night. Only when it’s raining.”

“It’s January in California. It’s rained every night.”

“It didn’t rain yesterday.”

“And yet you still found a reason to stay here half the night.”

“There was rain in the forecast. I needed to know she was safe.”

“Harpies, Haden. Sometimes rain is just rain. Come home. Unless you know something I don’t know?”

I hesitate for a moment. There was something—something I saw when we stopped for breakfast at that diner outside Vegas. The same one where Daphne, Garrick, and I had stopped for lunch on our way to find Sarah, the Oracle, and ended up meeting up with Tobin and Lexie. Thinking we were in the clear after we escaped the rain, we’d stopped for sustenance and to retrieve Lexie’s car. I hadn’t thought anything of the trucker who had been in the diner when we stopped there the first time—just a man in a hat with a scruffy beard who seemed to like pink, creamy looking drinks—but when I saw him there again, at four in the morning no less, I’d started to worry.

I watched him down two of those pink drinks while the others
ate piles of what Daphne had referred to as “buttermilk pancakes,” then he threw a few bills on the counter and left without giving us a second glance. I’d let myself relax then, even grunted in response when Daphne dared me to try bacon dipped in maple syrup, thinking I’d been a complete lunatic for being anxious about the man—but then I could have sworn that, through the diner’s dirty windows, I saw the man’s truck rumble to life before he even got inside it. As if he’d started it with the brush of his hand over the hood. Like the way I could start my Tesla with my lightning powers.

Much to the others’ protests, I’d insisted we leave as soon as the trucker pulled out of the parking lot. I didn’t mention what I saw because I didn’t see the man or his truck on the road. He wasn’t following us, and he wasn’t up ahead. I’d convinced myself that having my soul fried less than twenty-four hours before, followed by the tense drive out of the canyon, was making my mind play tricks on me. (For all I knew, there had been someone else in the truck to begin with.) And I didn’t feel like contradicting my passengers, who were treating me like I was some kind of Hercules for successfully executing our daring escape from Ellis.

My pride had gotten the better of me then, but the more days that passed and the more rain that fell, I had started to wonder if we had really escaped at all.

“No … It’s just a feeling,” I say, my pride getting to me once again. “You know. As if I’m still being followed.”

“They didn’t follow us.”

“You’re the one who is always telling me to trust my instincts.”

“Right … But, you know, if someone were watching us, you sitting outside her house every night is pretty much the same as erecting a huge, Vegas-style
THE CYPHER LIVES HERE
neon sign, right?”

I hadn’t thought of that.

“And if you kill yourself via sleep deprivation, then you’ll truly be no use to anyone.” Dax places his hand on my shoulder, next to a now-sleeping Brim. “How about you let me take up the watch tonight so you can go home and sleep? There is that school thing tomorrow and all.”

I try to take a sip of my coffee but all I find are the scalded dregs in my charred cup. Brim’s purring snores next to my ear seem particularly hypnotic. My eyelids feel heavy as I look up at Daphne’s house. All the lights are out now. I’m not going to be much use at school if I fall asleep in class. With Simon gone and Daphne knowing the truth, I normally wouldn’t see the point in continuing with the school charade—except I don’t like the idea of leaving Daphne unprotected all day long. Besides, I welcome the excuse to actually be close to her, instead of sitting outside her house at night.

I look out over the lake across the street from Daphne’s quiet home and notice that the rain is finally starting to let up. I contemplate going home to sleep so I’ll be prepared for tomorrow. My fingers are on the ignition button, ready to start the car, when a bolt of lightning rips the sky above the lake. Rolling thunder explodes with it, causing me to flinch at the nearness. But in the half second before my eyes clamp shut, I think I see someone standing on the lakeshore. Staring at me. When my eyes open another half second later, no one is there.

I jump out of my car and run toward the lake. The wet sand on the shore grips at my shoes, slowing my pace. Dax follows, calling, “What are you doing, Haden?” as if he hadn’t seen anything. Brim yowls in protest over having been awoken so abruptly, sinking her claws into my shoulder.

I cast about in the rain, but I don’t see anyone. I start to think I’d imagined seeing someone—perhaps I’d drifted momentarily asleep—but I make out what looks like a pair of boot prints in the sand before the lapping water of the lake washes them away.

“There,” I say, pointing to the now-gone prints. “Didn’t you see him?”

“Him?”
Dax shakes his head. “I saw lightning, but nothing else.”

I stand on the beach, frantically searching the shoreline with my eyes, that creeping feeling that I am being watched plaguing me. The rain, lighter than before but still a steady downpour, soaks through my thin shirt. Brim jumps from my shoulder and bounds back to the car, seeking shelter from the rain.

“Come on,” Dax says. “It was just lightning. You don’t want to be standing in the water if it strikes again.”

I cross my arms for warmth and turn back toward Daphne’s house, watching for any signs of trouble. Any thoughts of leaving, and any sleepiness, have vanished. I don’t care if I have to stand in the rain all night; I’ll do whatever it takes to keep Daphne safe.

chapter two